


fearful day, raging night

by 9_miho



Series: blue (white) caravan [3]
Category: Big Hero 6 (2014), Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Everyone Needs A Hug, Gen, Ghost Tadashi, Hiro Needs a Hug, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Survivor Guilt, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-01
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-04-02 06:58:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4050571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/9_miho/pseuds/9_miho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Honey Lemon extracts, distills, analyzes, applies, destroys.</p><p>(hope and heart to go forward but feel the past more keenly)</p>
            </blockquote>





	fearful day, raging night

Honey Lemon talks to her plants. She has three of them now that seem to have cottoned on to encouragement and those are her model students, not that she scolds the other tiny sprouts because comparisons aren’t productive (“natural selection,” “competition” aside). Maybe Fredzilla’s singing helps too (because well, he’s raising them too, he’s the one finding the seeds and calling her over and watching breathlessly as she gently extracts and writes notes and bottles the precious harvest).

 

Life from death, she thinks as she ponders the bigger skull she’s transplanted one of the little sprouts to (it has three eye sockets and a mangled sinus cage and she would have liked to have seen how the layers of sinew and flesh would have stretched over it and filled it out above the bleached white foundation that hinted so tantalizingly of the past).

 

In between her distillation and baking and tending, Honey Lemon wonders about a world with honey from combs instead of the old jars of yellow-brown sticky stuff they’d once scavenged from an old warehouse (they don’t eat much of it because she needs it to smear on burns and cuts). But even if she could cover the dunes with flowers (red and yellow and white over green, so much green), the bees won’t come back and she sighs over fuzzy little bumblebees that are probably vicious things with saw edged teeth now. Maybe they (They, we… “we few, we happy few, we band… band of brothers (and sisters and Baymax and ghosts)”) can have lemons someday though, and she can see if her hair matches the color, like Fredzilla claims, brandishing a brown edged advertisement for “The Original Lemonhead: Made with Real Lemon Juice!!”

 

As much as she loves her plants, coddles them because anything short of that will have them shriveling to poisoned dust before her eyes (once to make Fredzilla happy, now because they’re hers as much as his and theirs and the world’s), she loves chemistry more, knowing that she can sort out and remix the world for food or poison, fuel or deadweight. And she can maybe figure out the formula for beauty or joy or heart’s-ease because that’s probably based in a formula for detoxification, to turn the dull colors of a desperately ill world out there to a “palette” (ˈpalət/, _noun_ , noun: **palette** ; plural noun: **palettes** , a thin board or slab on which an artist lays and mixes colors).

 

But for now, she can keep Baymax going, keep them all going, buy some time to get them further, keep them standing and working and fighting. Fuel for now, to keep the engines of chrome and flesh going. Even if there’s something more they all need, including Baymax who is patient and protective and like and unlike all of them, living and dead.

 

She presses her hands against Baymax’s body all the time because she’s learned to feel how a new blend of guzzoline (one to two to one to three, ignition delay for flooding). She doesn’t have to even press her hands because she’s able to feel it from the very air. But she does it because she thinks about the memory of someone who is fading despite her grasp, slipping through her fingers like solvent from a cracked flask. It’s worse on long stretches of time when they are traveling and not quite on high alert (because they never let down their guard, can never really rest). Because that’s when the silence and empty hands and no real things left to do but to wait for something to not quite work and need tinkering presses against the skull and she tugs at her sleeves and wonders at hemming it up again and finding more material to make new cuffs before just _remembering_ without thinking about it at all. Except the memory is fading just a little slower than the red-pink dye of her jacket and then she has to try to grab at it, carefully and then desperately. And then, while she tries to remember a laugh or the set of some shoulders or bright eyes, she sometimes hears a muffled cry in midst of snores.

 

Honey Lemon picks up a blanket and she whispers a song of chemicals as she drapes the cloth over a sleeping boy curled up against the world and tucks the ends in (“Oxytocin, phenols, tungsten, chlorophyll, hemoglobin, anhydrous acetic acid”) and then she lets herself slowly run her fingers gently through his flyaway black hair under the tight brim of an old hat. Her mouth is tight and dry as she is both happy and utterly guilty at the influx of fuel and air to prop up a sputtering memory.

**Author's Note:**

> I had a lot of ideas for Honey Lemon that I had to prune back a few times (sometimes forcibly). She was also tricky as hell to figure out a good hero counterpart for the title. It doesn’t help that when I think “chemist” and “comics,” I think of Poison Ivy. While trawling the Green Lantern page at TV Tropes with vague thoughts of associating the Green Lantern (not any one of them in particular but just the powers/role of the Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps involving willpower and imagination), I found the Blue Lantern Corps creed and I think it suits Honey Lemon – acknowledged in canon as The Heart of the group.
> 
>  
> 
> _In fearful day, in raging night_  
>  _With strong hearts full our souls ignite_  
>  _When all seems lost in the War of Light_  
>  _Look to the stars - for hope burns bright!_


End file.
